Every now and then,
I delve in my files to puzzle over an essay called ‘Sunspots’ by Fereydoun
Hoveyda. Each time, I marvel at how it’s beautiful and strange, possibly
meaningless, possibly brilliant.

Using image-ideas not
customary in conventional European aesthetics, Hoveyda explains that cinema
works best when it captures and channels an ever-unfolding force that
runs through the spaces and temporal rhythms of a film and also through
the audience in the dark room. When a film really works, he explains,
some kind of energy pulses coherently in space, in time and in people
so that the animus of a scene flares through all the components of an
individual shot and then arcs like electricity from shot to shot, from
moment to moment, from screen to audience and back again. The rhythms
and melody-lines (visual as well as sonic) all generate a charge that
carries, excites and transforms everypart of the film: characters,
objects, spaces, luminance, time-patterns and viewers all get altered
as the dynamics play out. The result is pantheistic somehow. When a film
lights up like this, a world of energy is harnessed, swirling around us
and through us. In front of the cinema screen, we are sometimes bathed
and buffeted by a force that’s vital like the sun. Hence the name of Hoveyda’s
essay.

Originally
published in 1960, ‘Sunspots’ has been salvaged from obscurity by Jim Hillier’s
anthology of Cahiers du cinéma, 1960 - 68. (1) When I first
encountered it as a postgraduate philosophy student during the 1980s, I
thought: ‘Maybe it’s a con, a parlour game staged by one of the Cahiers
insiders under cover of an extravagant nom de plume.’ But I thought
too that it had a palpable sincerity, that it was propelled by an ardent
intellect and an avid emotion, that it fizzed with a yearning for the power
that courses through movies. I sensed how the author revered radiance and
really wanted to know kinetic luminance, to be with the dynamics
that define cinema. I remember thinking, ‘maybe it’s some kind of mystical
text, a Sufi thing perhaps, a sparkling mystery designed to riddle some
realisation slowly out from my bewilderment’. That thought passed through
me momentarily until, youngster that I was, I let some other notion take
me elsewhere.

Even so, I keep coming
back to ‘Sunspots’. And I’ve learned a little about Hoveyda. How he was
indeed a Cahiers insider, but not with a nom de plume. How
it’s probably true that a mystical charge is the main topic of his essay.
(Whether this charge is Sufi at all, I’m not qualified to say.)

Hoveyda was the son
of a diplomat and he would eventually become a celebrated Arabic philosopher,
metaphysician and historian. In the secular domain, he would be appointed
Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations; and his older brother Amir Abbas
Hoveyda would be Prime Minister in the Shah’s regime prior to being executed
in 1979 during the fundamentalist ructions. But political power and its
searing outbursts would come later. Back at the time of writing ‘Sunspots’,
the younger Hoveyda was living in Paris, studying aesthetics while working
on the editorial board of Cahiers du cinéma and developing
an enduring friendship and professional partnership with Roberto Rossellini.

As
for the elemental energies that Hoveyda brought so lucidly into focus, actually
they’ve always been in cinema. When the Lumière Brothers set up their
first films in the 1890s, viewers flocked to the screenings when they heard,
among the chatter of reports, some amazing accounts of trees! Maxim Gorky,
for example, was disturbed by the way some kind of ghost-power seemed to
shiver the leaves. (2) Framed aloft in the dark, the trees appeared to be
oddly alive. For Gorky, cinema offered life in spectral form. He saw not
an intensification or clarification, but a leached trace of natural vitality.
It worried him. However, it galvanised him too; the vivacity of his writing
betrays him. All the things moving on the screen, they were like kindred
creatures signalling to the human beings in the darkened room, as if the
screen were transmitting a fellow-feeling that jumped out of the trees,
across the auditorium, into the audience, and back again. In such a world,
all things with movement in them might be considered siblings somehow. If
city-folk had lost the ability to sense such animism, this cinematograph
might bring them back to the mysteries. Perhaps cinema, which Gorky called
‘the kingdom of shadows’, was too savage for him. Or too pagan. But he couldn’t
stop himself confessing how engaging it was.

At cinema’s inception,
many people felt they had access to a quickened world, one they had lost
but could recognise as kindred to them as soon as they saw it jittering
above and through them. No longer, when observing pictures, were viewers
simply assaying objects or locations awaiting annexation. Rather, witnesses
to this new art were encountering a world flaring out against darkness,
a world that was protean, spirited and wondrous, perhaps even sacred and
not entirely tractable. From its earliest moments, cinema offered an entry-point
to a mentality different from the objectivity that has governed Western
reality for several centuries. Not affirmative of a stable, nominalist
world, cinema came as a cult for shape-shifters. Right from the start,
it was animated by that radiant energy which Hoveyda would later evoke
so well in his metaphor of the transformative sunspot.

In recent times, the
practice of ecology has helped us understand how an interconnecting energy
might weave through space and time so that the definitions of what is
inert and what is alive must undergo extensive redefinition. Many cultures
give spirit-names to an animating force that binds places, things and
rhythms into the lively world. Hoveyda hinted at spiritualism when, like
an astro-physicist priest, he suggested that the cinema screen in the
auditorium resembles the sun in deep space, its energy boiling on the
surface and surging into the dark ambit, altering everything that has
light in it or on it.

Robert Bresson regarded
cinema similarly. Filmmaking is a process of binding ‘persons to each
other and to objects by looks’, he asserted in his gnostic Notes on
the Cinematographer. When a film is working well for Bresson, the
world portrayed seems alive and radiant because every element of the film
‘clings’ to ‘knots’ of ‘force’ and ‘security’ which get generated all
the time the celluloid is running through the projector. A resonant power
is produced, as if the film-strip combines with the projector to form
a fusion-reactor: ‘an image [can be] transformed by contact with other
images as is a colour by contact with other colours’. Bresson declared
that there can be ‘no art without transformation’. He made a note to himself.
‘Your images will release their phosphorous only in aggregating.’ (3)

I’ve tarried awhile
with Hoveyda and Bresson so they can help this big idea dawn: a movie
can build up a luminous charge, like some phosphorescent transformer energising
the world of space, light, sound and time. The screen is no mere lodgement
for the things represented on it. Rather, it is an energy field. And every
thing engaged on and by the screen can get transformed so that each thing
represented there can be known as no longer a self-contained object but
a sensate and inter-connected part of a flowing system of energy. The
screen offers pulses of light and movement, after all. Energy.

Irradiated thus, consciousness
can alter and expand radically during a movie. I mean all consciousness
– of the entire represented world, not just the viewer. The screen receives
and generates energy over time. This energy affects every thing it plays
upon, every thing represented on the screen and every thing in the auditorium.
Such is the allure of cinema: it engrosses us in its force-field; it helps
us feel a volatile but coherent world surging through our nervous systems;
it transmogrifies us at the core and at the edges of what we think to
be our selves.

Hoveyda’s essay is
a lens into the extraordinary intellectual world of French film culture
during the 1960s, a world informed by great ethnographers like Jean Rouch
and Claude Levi-Strauss, a world accommodating many ‘Eastern’ strands
of aesthetics, a world fascinated by ‘otherness’, magic, eros and violence.
(Note how Jean Vigo, Georges Bataille and Alexandre Kojève were
so influential on the defining intellectuals of this time.) A product
of this era, ‘Sunspots’ shows how a rich and rigorous current of mysticism
infuses the wonderment and sensuous satisfaction that defines great movies.

Which brings me, at
last, to John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Taking Hoveyda’s ideas,
and sensing how they resonate with some other practical metaphysics that
I’ve been reading lately (for instance, David Mowaljarlai and Bernard
Cache), (4) I want to assay the extraordinary power in the opening minutes
of Ford’s masterpiece, to understand the odd spell it casts through me
every time I become part of it.

So, I’ll talk us through
the opening minutes now. I’ll use myself as an experimental specimen.
Watch what happens to me.

Roll the film.

First there is a symphonic
blast from an orchestra, a couple of frames ahead of the Warner Bros logo.
The noise and the logo mark a border, making a kind of heraldic declaration:
‘For this session, your film consciousness starts here and now’. Then
I get the credits. And the song, intoning ‘what makes a man to wander?’
I’m being eased out of the workaday world that I brought into the room.
The song lulls me, lets me loosen my focus, lets me wander just a little
till all the credits do the business and the lyrics tail out: ‘RIDE AWAY
... RIDE away ... ride away.’

Then blackness.

Then a single white
title on black: ‘TEXAS 1868’.

Then blackness again,
as the title fades off.

Fleetingly I realise
that the sequence has taken on the rhythm of a person blinking.

Then, continuing that
rhythm, a patch of whiteness intrudes again on the blackness, while I
take a slippery moment to understand that I am now seeing a door being
unlatched like an opening eye. I am seeing from inside a dark room which
looks out on to a landscape so bright and stark that I keep on blinking.

In the door frame,
there’s a woman, silhouetted, who looks out from the eye of the room.
Then comes a tracking drift forward toward the door and across the threshold,
out to the liminal porch as the woman moves as if she’s pulled outside
by a force slightly stronger than the combined propulsion of her own walking
and the implied push of the dollying camera. A startling play of forces
contend at the door frame: wind ruffles her clothing; light pours in towards
me; she stutter-steps forward; the camera half-follows/half-propels her
out to the porch until she and I sense that the landscape has managed
to hold her, more than equalling the power of the camera, momentarily.
Indeed the camera seems to acknowledge this and it stops its push forward,
with the effect that after all this blinking, pulsing, breathy buffeting,
pushing and pulling, after the mess of all this organic effort ... everything
pauses in a tense, elastic balance. She stops and the camera stops as
if it has surrendered her, while she halts and looks out and the wind
plays all over her edges, as if to signal that this stillness is not stoppage
but just a moment in which restless movement changes rather than ceases.

Time out.

Let’s stop the film
awhile. For we need to take stock of this initial shot.

After examining this
sequence countless times over the years, I know that just about everything
The Searchers has to offer gets presaged in the first shot. The
whole film is given to us, not as a set of themes or meanings, but as
a system of power-oscillations back and forth between the incursive and
the indigenous, the built and the given, the imposed and the impounded.
Ford will spend the rest of the film teasing all this out. But he gives
us the major sensations of his movie, cryptically, in his first camera
set-up.

When running a film
in a dark classroom, I often call out, asking the students to ask themselves,
‘Who or what is looking right now? Who or what is listening right now?’
I ask also, ‘What confluent forces are shaping the scene right now, what’s
making everything tend in a particular direction?’ It takes the students
awhile to sense what we’re trying to find: I’m asking them to divine a
kind of organised, shape-shifting spirit moving through the film and through
them.

Let’s put these questions
to the first shot of The Searchers.

Note how I kept talking
about the camera following and looking? Well, that was me avoiding the
spooky issue, which is ... the camera is really just a device serving
something else that’s doing the looking. Yes, it’s me – the viewer, served
by the camera – doing the looking. But already the film has turned me
into something other than myself. This is the spooky thing. No matter
how worrying it might be, I have to keep insisting: who or what is looking
and listening?

We’ll get to an answer
before too long. But first let’s just keep the question ticking over in
the background while I set The Searchers running again.

The second shot is
a tight reverse. It lets me look at the woman and at the windowed wall
of the cabin (this wall-eyed cabin) behind her. On the steps of the porch,
the camera is still attached to the cabin, I surmise, and the landscape
is at my back, feeling ominously present behind me. So, from these steps
on the porch, the camera looks at her looking. She is still buffeted by
the wind and by the light and she holds on to a stanchion while she raises
her left hand in a balancing gesture that also affords her some shade.
She’s awash in all kinds of energy. And some of it is tamped inside her,
ready to pour out. I can see that.

I ask myself, who or
what is looking right now? Well, it’s no human character that I’ve met.
It’s the film itself, possibly. But that’s too glib. In this shot offered
from the steps, the looking thing is rhythmically related to whatever
was looking in the first shot. I feel this relationship because of a continuity
that flows across the edit from the first shot to the second. This continuity,
which has been sustained by the music and the wind, tells me that the
entity looking is the same in each shot, despite the radically different
perspectives availed by the camera. This entity is extensive; it is large
and contains multitudes.

Then comes the third
shot, from a new place on the porch: looking out toward the sunlight,
I get a full view of a landscape with a horseman approaching in the middle
distance. I see how the wind keeps agitating. I see the wind working on
a blanket slung across a tethering rail that marks the edge of the cabin’s
precinct in the lower foreground.

Next, looking back
to the cabin, from the steps again, I see people start to come out of
the front room, as if drawn out by the landscape but also as if wilfully
disgorged by the cabin. Something palpable pushes out from the cabin and
through me as I feel caught between the forces defining the cabin and
the forces defining the landscape. These contending dynamics move me and
move through me. As this feeling registers, three more people ooze out
from the cabin. A dog comes out too, on to the porch. Then another person.
It is as if the cabin has chosen to mobilise all these emissaries in response
to the stimulus of the landscape and the horseman. The dog starts barking.

Still on the porch,
but from an entirely new camera set-up, I get a mid-shot view of the dog.
Then with the sound of the dog still barking, I get a view which might
be from the perspective of the dog, but it might also be from any or all
of the human characters who have been spirited out of the cabin. And from
this camera-vantage, I see that John Wayne has brought his character,
Ethan, to the steps of the porch.

I see looks and handshakes
exchanged. All this is viewed from camera set-ups on the porch.

Then there’s a wide
shot, from out in the landscape, looking back to the cabin from the ‘wild’
side of the tethering-rail. I feel this cut like something shocking, thrilling
and threatening. It’s a major development. For the first time, I’m clearly
detached from the cabin, and it feels hugely significant, panicky in its
importance. This sense of panic flickers half-formed in me, before the
camera bumps me back to the more comforting porch-step position and frames
a close view of the cabin. I thank the film for this return of sanctuary.
Oddly, I feel I have come back to myself.

Now, from the porch-steps,
I see and feel a sequence that’s flat-out astonishing. As the woman
keeps her eyes on Ethan, she backs into the cabin, through the door and
into its interior. Ethan moves forward, as if drawn by powers stronger
than him. Everyone else, including the dog, does the same. Ineluctably,
it seems, the cabin takes everyone into itself.

To show this, the camera
has rebounded, with a hard cut, back out into the country. From out on
the wild edge of the landscape, out where I’ve just had that sudden feeling
of disturbing detachment, I see the cabin reclaim its settlers and I feel
how keen I am to be drawn back in there too. I feel it like an organic
flex in myself, as if I crave to be part of the cabin, as if I have rights
and responsibilities over every thing in the cabin. Now that this intruder
Ethan has come amidst us and now that the film has buffeted my edges,
I feel the need to find myself again. And I realise, with a shock that
is vertiginous and organic every time I see the film ... I realise
that I have become the cabin! The cabin is myself. All the camera set-ups
and edits have built and braced me so. And it’s a living thing, this cabin;
it’s pulsing, blinking, remembering. It has worldly compulsions coursing
through it. It is not an inert object. It is a being in a large
system of assertive needing and wanting. I know this because I have felt
what it feels, and I have felt my need for it. I have felt a spirit-possession
of sorts; I’ve been mildly inculcated to an animistic realm, a world where
every thing is a live thing.

Question: Who or what
is looking, listening, breathing, feeling? Answer: For the first five
minutes or so, it’s the cabin. It’s me as the cabin.

This is the finish
of the prelude, the film in cryptic miniature. Next there’s a lengthy
interior sequence in which it becomes clearer and clearer that if the
walls could speak they would tell of a painful and only partially acknowledged
yearning between Ethan and the woman. Only three characters know this:
the woman, Ethan and the cabin. How achingly the cabin knows it. How nobly
the cabin keeps its knowledge. Indeed, how nobly the cabin does its many
different keeping tasks. It keeps coolness and shaded ease safe against
the hot glare of the landscape; it keeps a spectrum of colours in balance
– blues against reds – as it arrays a comforting space for all these folks
surviving not only the abrasions of the landscape but also (we glean this
knowledge from conversations) the recent ructions of the Civil War. The
cabin keeps domestic stillness counterpoised against natural wildness
and political malevolence. The cabin knows everything that has passed
amongst this tiny, vulnerable colony. And I know this too, because I have
been allowed to be the cabin. I don’t know it cerebrally so much
as nervously, as a series of blinking, pulsing emotions, anxieties
and affections all infused within the cabin. I feel a real affection –
self-love I suppose – for its timber and stone, for the table, the stove,
for the spaces of conviviality that it offers to all the desiring characters
who are sluicing around inside it. I feel the cabin’s organic completeness,
its sensitivity.

This is why I will
feel something like a nervous collapse at the first narrative turning-point
a few minutes later, when the cabin and most of its humans are destroyed
by the Comanche raid.

Each time I witness
the raid, I feel it with an electrical distress that justifies my allegiance,
for a while, to the berserker vengeance of Ethan. The nervous shock I
feel when the cabin gets destroyed impels me into the film, to ride along
with my blood up, accompanying Ethan, until I finally realise, sixty minutes
in, that he is insane, that I have to find or make another consciousness
to lead me to another morality – not Comanche and not Ethan – that might
guide me through this tragedy of a stolen country. Over the duration of
the entire film I experience an ethical flow from naïve affection,
to blood-simple revenge, to analytical reflection to personal conjecture.
This is the greatness of The Searchers: it is an active and activating
system of urges all organised toward the creation of an ethical code which
is not clearly signposted at the start. The film just propels me toward
this unguided spot. There is no point of moral stasis (other than Ford’s
overwhelming affirmation of the basic goodness of generous love, perhaps)
pinning the film down treatise-like. I am not propelled toward one unarguable
standpoint. Rather the film puts me in motion, tipping me into its moral
turbulence and setting my passions in contention with my reason. Over
a couple of hours, the film lets me know a world that’s neither ‘Western’
nor ‘indigenous’, that’s both animistic and objective, that’s ancient
and entirely contemporary and always under construction.

All the transformations
that the film works on me, they push me toward new knowledge, but it’s
a knowledge that looms in my sentiments before it registers in my intellect.
Only afterwards, when I’m enthralled, puzzled and reflective, only then
can I bring some of these sensations into cognition. This is not to say
the film is ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ particularly, but it is certainly
not Cartesian!

Which brings me back
to the metaphysics I’ve been reading while getting ready to display my
Searchers mania in public like this. Perhaps the most ‘visionary’
has been by David Mowaljarlai, who spent the final twenty years of his
life creating a spiritual system – pragmatic, ethical, ecological – that
he was determined to communicate to non-indigenous Australians. This system
was based on ritual knowledge stored in his country in northwestern Australia
and it was enlivened by his bold decision to share portions of this knowledge
more broadly than they had ever been transmitted before.

5.
See David Mowaljarlai, ABC Radio Feature, The Law Report, Tuesday 31st
October, 1995 <http://www.abc.net.au/rn>

Reasoning
that the colonial invasions have brought fundamental change to such a degree
that the indigenous systems need to change too, Mowaljarlai asserts that
the country has psychic, social, geological and botanical life all synthesised
into a vitality that guides a person to sensible actions. Literally sensible.
Mowaljarlai describes how he can feel the presence (or not), the valence
(or not), the direction (or dissipation) of this vitality and how he can
act in communion with it. He can find spots in space and moments in time
where the urgency in country is intensified, where this force signals most
emphatically. He senses the land’s animus ‘swinging’ around him.
(5) He can attune to it through cultural work, through ritual tale-telling
and remembering, making events and structures that frame and intensify the
force – marking the ground, lodging painted figures in caves, determining
sightlines to other sacred zones, bouncing sound off cliff-faces. In other
words, he arranges a mise en scène of country and from that
mise en scène he gets cues for action, taking direction from
the scene, on the understanding that countless ancestors have already fashioned
it into a kind of energy-generator.

Mowaljarlai and Hoveyda
would have understood portions of each other’s beliefs. Ditto Bernard
Cache when he describes how architecture is best understood as a system
of frames and folds which channel the continuous flow of time and space
through each other, integrating all the materials, surfaces, sheets of
light, vaults of air and volumes of sound that are ready to resonate in
any environment. (6) Amplifying Cache’s provocations, Elizabeth Grosz
has suggested that architecture might be usefully regarded as the primary
art, because it establishes frames that concentrate nature’s dynamics
– the sill of a door that makes a floor distinct from the ground, the
soffit that emphasises the shelter of a roof against a wall, the frame
forming a window, a directional cairn of stones that’s been set down to
show how to bring a river to you when you make tracks through a savannah.
Grosz describes architecture as a process whereby one renders space
lively by harnessing and organising the tendencies that are abroad
in the territory that is being constructed. (7) It is doing for space
what social history and personal memory do for time – providing gravitas
and momentum. And it’s close to Hoveyda’s vision of cinema’s irradiated
universe.

So, to sum up and to
let you go back to the film … The pulse detected by Mowaljarlai, Cache
and Grosz accords with the liveliness I feel when I am the cabin in The
Searchers. Dylan Thomas once wrote of his yearning to catch ‘the force
that through the green fuse drives the flower’. (8) This feels almost
right for what John Ford marshals in The Searchers, except that
we need a metaphor with more blood and heat in it. For, a pressed brew
of corpuscular red is contained by the cabin. There’s colonialism and
the clash of incursive and indigenous consciousness; there’s domesticity
contending with the hunter’s depredations; masculinity at odds with femininity;
desire unrelenting despite repression and distraction; passion and reason
disturbing each other; conciliation rankling with vengeance. All these
forces make the vitality of the cabin. Because the cabin has moved through
me and made me as I’ve felt the flowing construction of The Searchers,
and because the cabin is the first creature killed in the film, I know
in my nerves the drama of America, founded as it is on violence, maintained
as it is in blood, burned as it is by all the flaring energy that assails
it, inside and out, all through time.

I understand at last
that this is what it is The Searchers lets me feel, cryptically:
America. The cabin is me and the cabin is America. The beast itself, pulsing,
breathing, wanting. Vulnerable as it is vital. Mad as it is visionary.
America. In 1956 and forever after. Always poised to be dismembered and
dismantled even as it gets created. Even as it tries to re-make the entire
world in its own image.